La amistad es eterna, la paciencia no.

Hello, Vampire Chronicles fans.

Sit down. We need to have a chat.

You see, while some people are very much excited for a new show about our pompous king of the assholes (and I say this as a term of endearment, having loved Lestat since I was a depressed teenager living in New York, shuffling through my mom’s fiction section) we need to pause and remember this:

Anne Rice does not support fan fiction or anything that is not glowing praise.

Read it again, slowly.

Anne Rice does not support fan fiction or anything that is not glowing praise.

This is difficult for younger fans to understand, but let’s take a walk down memory lane.

She has threatened to sue writers in the past. She is one of the most prolific writers of our generation, and she does not support people using her characters for their own work.

In fact, in 2000 she went on a binge-attack against her fans. She threatened legal action against fans who wrote or drew her characters, but especially those who wrote with them. She sent them weeks of harassing letters and doxxed them on the internet.

Let me repeat that.

She doxxed people who wrote fan fiction.

She harassed them online and threatened to contact employers.

She used her fans to outright attack other fans.

This isn’t even something she can just shake off now, with the comment of “It was so long ago” because she did this to a writer who wrote commentary on her story in 2013.

In 2013.

While it was not that she wrote fan fiction, she still shows that she has no respect for people who are in fandom.

Remember those disclaimers used in fan fics, at the beginning? “I do not own …. ”? Yeah, a lot of that has to do with the fact that Anne Rice and others like her would attack fandoms and threaten them, and was in hopes that they would just leave us alone. She didn’t.

In short: Do not trust Anne Rice. I love her writing, I have read every book she has even written, but I do not trust her.

However, according to copyright law fanfiction is considered a transformative work, and therefore is considered fair use.

For real. She told them that.

I’m such a fandom old I remember Wendi and Richard Pini going out of their way to make their characters accessible to fans, but still telling them they had to slap three paragraphs of carefully written disclaimers all over everything. Like, even for fanart. You wanted to draw Cutter and Skywise doing the do? You had to put that disclaimer on it somehow.

AO3 and the current creator-reactions to fanfic are so, so very new. Don’t ever forget how privileged we are to be here.

I mean like Knight’s Tale “chanting Queen at the jousting tournament ‘foxy lady’” levels of anachronism. Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters with Hansel injecting himself with insulin and Gretel wielding a multiple-shot crossbow levels of anachronism. Go for Blazing Saddles, Blackadder, Jack of All Trades, Connecticut Yankee levels of anachronism

IMPORTANT

So the way Ao3 works? Is that the only way they can protect us from content creators and their legal teams, is to be like “hey, look, this is transformative work for fun! It earns no money!” And that’s how they get around what many authors still in this day and age think of as plagiarism and defemataion.

It’s actually in Ao3′s Terms of Services, not because they are monsters who don’t want you to thrive, but because it’s the only way to protect fan creators from the proverbial wolf at the door. I’m just old enough to remember when Anne Rice and Star Wars were going after people and filing official take downs for fan works and threatening to sue people. I know actual people who got real letters telling them to take down their fanzine or else.

I write fic with the explicit understanding that what I am doing is FREE, both as a content creator and as a consumer. FREE is inherent.

(Personally I find ko-fi to be a little offensive. Even if they’re technically “donations”, you’re still monetizing something you shouldn’t be. Want to express how much you love something? USE YOUR FUCKING WORDS, PEOPLE. Comment, like, share. Don’t make this a financial transaction.)

Long before Ao3 somehow wrestled derivative work into being legal, I understood that what I am creating is not technically mine. Do I work hard at it? Absolutely. Would I love to get paid for the thousands of hours of my time? God yes. But I am also very much aware that I don’t own this sandbox I’m playing in, and therefore have no right to solicit. The only reason I don’t still write “not mine, don’t sue” as my opening line is because Ao3 has predicating its existence declaring that for me. 

Given enough provocation, Disney or etc could come down on AO3 and the rest of us and stomp us into oblivion, and they would be well within their legal rights to do so. Yeah, maybe they’ve decided that artists at cons aren’t worth going after, but Ao3 is a juicy target and its our job as users to protect it at all costs. That means not mentioning money. 

If you want to get paid for your writing, do like 50 Shades of Gray and make your work different enough that’ll it’ll stand up to the copyright issue. If you’re dead set on getting paid for fanfic, contact the copyright holder. Star Trek has serialized novels. So does Star Wars. It’s a long shot, but if you’ve got a professional-level proposal, there’s a nonzero chance it might work. Otherwise, you need to accept that this is free content. It always had been.

I know this is probably coming across as a rant by a hysteric copyright shill, but at this moment, it’s the way things are. If we want to keep creating our transformative works, we need to work within those boundaries, because if we don’t there’s a very strong risk we’ll lose everything.

If you’re doing this to get paid, you should be creating original works. Fanfic should be free. Fanfic is a gift. 

It’s got an almost endless range of furniture, doors, windows, stairs etc and is easy to use. In addition to that, you don’t have to install anything and if you create an account (which is free) you can save and return to your houses.

Examples (all done by me):

Here’s an example for how you can use it

Anyone with a name that starts with a “Z”, ends with an “i”, and isn’t some kind of Italian pasta, IS SERIOUS